Santorum: 'I can't look past Iowa' yet

My story this morning looks at how lagging Republican candidates — such as Rick Santorum, Jon Huntsman and Michele Bachmann — have retrenched to run one- or two-state campaigns, even as the national GOP frontrunners keep broadening the primary map.

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Santorum described his underdog strategy in more or less those terms on Hugh Hewitt's radio show, responding to a question about whether he'd compete in out-of-order Arizona and Florida contests:

You know, no matter what Arizona and Florida does, Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina are going to be first. And so I'm going to compete in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, because they will, no matter what the other states do, those three states will move ahead of them. And so they will be first, and that's where I'm going to compete, because I can't look past Iowa, at least not at this point. And so we're going to be in Iowa this weekend. I just came from New Hampshire yesterday, I'll be in South Carolina on Wednesday, just to give you an idea. I mean, that's where my focus is, and we're doing well there. We're building a good grassroots organization. We've got a lot of energy and excitement, and they recognize that I'm not the fair-weather conservative.